Full credit to my colleague Jack Abbot for using this awesome phrase in an Engineering Management meeting I observed recently. It’s a gem. Filed! The context was around spending extra cycles creating more metrics that basically measure the same thing. And in theory, sure, you don’t want or need to do that, even if you do have a cool data visualization tool that encourages metric proliferation.

But as I was thinking about it a bit more, I think there are situations where you might want multiple thermometers to tell you about the done-ness of the turkey.

First, sometimes you learn something by measuring the same thing in multiple ways. Triangulation can be a beautiful thing. Not only does it work for satellites, but think of a situation where you have a metric that is really made up of multiple underlying metrics. Net Promoter Score is a good example. Aren’t you better off knowing the number of Promoters and Detractors as well as the Net?

Second, sometimes redundant metrics aren’t bad if there is a potential failure of one of them. For critical systems metrics that are measured in automated ways, sometimes automation fails. The second thermometer could be thought of as a backup. You can have an internal web performance monitoring system, but wouldn’t you feel better with Keynote or Gomez as well, just in case your internal system fails?

Finally, sometimes metrics move between “lagging” and “leading,” which are fundamentally different and useful for different purposes. For example, we talk about sales in a couple different ways here. There are bookings, which are forward-looking, and there is recognized revenue, which is backwards looking. They are both about revenue. But looking only at recognized revenue tells you nothing about the health of new business. And looking only at bookings tells you very little about the current and next quarter.

Jack, thanks for this gem of a phrase, and for the thinking it provoked!

A couple OnlyOnce readers asked me to do a post on how I run senior team offsites. It’s a great part of our management meeting routine at Return Path, and one that Patrick Lencioni talks about extensively in Death by Meeting (review, book) – a book worth reading if you care about this topic.

My senior team has four offsites per year. I love them. They are, along with my Board meetings, my favorite times of the year at work. Here’s my formula for these meetings:

– WHY: There are a few purposes to our offsites. One for us is that our senior team is geographically distributed across 4 geographies at the executive level and 6 or 7 at the broader management team level. So for us, these are the only times of the year that we are actually in the same place. But even if we were all in one place, we’d still do them. The main purpose of the offsite is to pull up from the day-to-day and tackle strategic issues or things that just require more uninterrupted time. The secondary purpose is to continue to build and develop the team, both personal relationships and team dynamics. It’s critically important to build and sustain deep relationships across the Executive Team. We need this time in order to be a coordinated, cohesive, high trust, aligned leadership team for the company. As the company has expanded (particularly to diverse geographies), our senior team development has become increasingly critical

– WHO: Every offsite includes what we call our Executive Committee, which is for the most part, my direct reports, though that group also includes a couple C/SVP titled people who don’t report directly to me but who run significant parts of the company (7-8 people total). Two of the four offsites we also invite the broader leadership team, which is for the most part all of the people reporting into the Executive Committee (another 20 people). That part is new as we’ve gotten bigger. In the earlier days, it was just my staff, and maybe one or two other people as needed for specific topics

– WHERE: Offsites aren’t always offsite for us. We vary location to make geography work for people. And we try to contain costs across all of them. So every year, probably 2 of them are actually in one of our offices or at an inexpensive nearby hotel. Then the other 2 are at somewhat nicer places, usually one at a conference-oriented hotel and then one at a more fun resort kind of place. Even when we are in one of our offices, we really treat it like an offsite – no other meetings, etc., and we make sure we are out together at dinner every night

– WHEN: 4x/year at roughly equal intervals. We used to do them right before Board meetings as partial prep for those meetings, but that got too crowded. Now we basically do them between Board meetings. The only timing that’s critical is the end of year session which is all about budgeting and planning for the following year. Our general formula when it’s the smaller group is two days and at least one, maybe two dinners. When it’s the larger group, it’s three days and at least two dinners. For longer meetings, we try to do at least a few hours of fun activity built into the schedule so it’s not all work.

– WHAT: Our offsites are super rigorous. We put our heads together to wrestle with (sometimes solve) tough business problems – from how we’re running the company, to what’s happening with our culture, to strategic problems with our products, services and operations. The agenda for these offsites varies widely, but the format is usually pretty consistent. I usually open every offsite with some remarks and overall themes – a mini-state-of-the-union. Then we do some kind of “check-in” exercise either about what people want to get out of the offsite, or something more fun like an envisioning exercise, something on a whiteboard or with post-its, etc. We always try to spend half a day on team and individual development. Each of us reads out our key development plan items from our most recent individual 360, does a self-assessment, then the rest of the team piles on with other data and opinions, so we keep each other honest and keep the feedback flowing. Then we have a team development plan check-in that’s the same, but about how the team is interacting. We always have one or two major topics to discuss coming in, and each of those has an owner and materials or a discussion paper sent out a few days ahead of time. Then we usually have a laundry list of smaller items ranging from dumb/tactical to brain-teasing that we work in between topics or over meals (every meal has an agenda!). There’s also time at breaks for sub-group meetings and ad hoc conversations. We do try to come up for air, but the together time is so valuable that we squeeze every drop out of it. Some of our best “meetings” over the years have happened side-by-side on elliptical trainers in the hotel gym at 6 a.m. We usually have a closing check-out, next steps recap type of exercise as well.

– HOW: Lots of our time together is just the team, but we usually have our long-time executive coach Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting facilitate the development plan section of the meeting.

I’m sure I missed some key things here. Team, feel free to comment and add. Others with other experiences, please do the same!

I liked this book a lot. First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book. And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one. The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment.

But the premise, as the subtitle indicates, is that maintaining organizational health is the most important thing you can do as a leader. I tell our team at Return Path all the time that our culture is a competitive advantage in many ways, some quantifiable, and others a little less tangible.

A telling point in the book is when Lencioni is relaying a conversation he had with the CEO of a client company who does run a healthy organization – he asked, “Why in the world don’t your competitors do any of this?” And the client responded, “You know, I honestly believe they think it’s beneath them.” Lencioni goes on to say, “In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it.” And there you have it. More examples of why “the soft stuff” is mission critical.

Lencioni’s “Recipe for Organizational Health” (the outline of the book):

– Build a Cohesive Leadership Team

– Create Clarity

– Overcommunicate Clarity

– Reinforce Clarity

And his recipe for creating a tight set of “mission/vision/values” (the middle of the book):

1. Why do we exist?

2. How do we behave?

3. What do we do?

4. How will we succeed?

5. What is most important, right now?

6. Who must do what?

While there are lots of other good frameworks for doing all of this, Lencioni’s models and books are great, simple reminders of one of the CEO’s most important leadership functions. We’re recrafting our own mission and values statements at the moment at Return Path, and we’re doing it using this 6-Question framework instead of the classic “Mission/Vision/Values” framework popularized a few years back by Harvard Business Review.

To follow up on last week’s post about the two types of entrepreneurs, I hear from people all the time that they can’t be an entrepreneur because they’re not creative. I used to say that myself, but Mariquita reminds me periodically that that’s nonsense…and as a case in point, I didn’t have the original idea that gave birth to Return Path James Marciano did. And I didn’t have the original idea to create a deliverability business, George Bilbrey did. Or an inbox organizer consumer application, Josh Baer did.

But I still consider myself an entrepreneur as the founder and leader of the company, as it takes a lot of creativity and business building acumen to get from an idea to a business, or from a small business to a big business.

Sure, you can invent something from scratch. Someone created the first car. The first computer. The first telephone. Harnessed the power of electricity for home/commercial use. The first deliverability service or inbox organizer. George and others will say you can create a process for this…but I think it’s a bit like lightening striking.

But sometimes the best ideas are ones that are borrowed from others or combined from other sets of existing things. There’s nothing wrong with that! And you can do this without stealing intellectual property. For example, I took a ton of business trips my first few years out of college with a heavy duffel bag that caused a pinched nerve in my shoulder. Then someone decided to put wheels, a relatively old and stable technology, on suitcases about 15 years ago. Hallelujah.

UPDATE: This week’s Economist has an interesting article that fits right into this discussion. It’s called In Praise of Misfits, and its telling subtitle is something like “Why business needs people with dyslexia, ADD, and Asperger’s.” A great read on this theme.